Ah, software. New revised. again tool selections.

Belay that! Hold all tool selection ideas before this. I wish I could use TikiWiki, but it is too template driven, hence slow, has a wiki syntax incompatible with the popular wikipedia, which is driven by the very nice MediaWiki. I like MediaWiki, just like it, best of all. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. And for blogs, I like WordPress, which is surely the best known and best supported of all. Just the ease of uploading and installing plugins alone would make it powerful. WordPress has CMS capabilities, but I am using Joomla, withy some reservations. I may regret that, and it is not too late to put everything under WordPress. I will try using WordPress only, no other CMS on a new subdomain created for the specific purpose of writing a novel about Social Technology. The novel itself will be a blog, but I may add pages about the characters, settings and ideas. A writer’s notebook.

Now to the more serious matter at hand, what I am now calling the Advanced Social Technology Software Development Project. No attempt to make that an nice sounding acronym, sorry. I am just not going to blog any code or publish in any other way for quite a while. I love to write code and find anything else boring, but there is just no way to handle a big project like this without lots of other work before any coding is done. I’ll try to put up a blog post every day about software development, not mentioning tools very often, except when I need to write about tools we need to incorporate in whatever software we write. I say we, though I modestly claim the ability to do it all myself, given time, because it is software we urgently need and it is too big a project for one man. What I hope to do is produce a good set of analysis and design documents, be prepared to have the design thrown out the window by anyone who comes to help, then and only then write some code myself. Of the two progamming languages I have already chosen, Python for the client-side and PHP for the server-side, I’d prefer to do the Python programming, on and for my own desktop machine, first, later setting it up to interact with the server. But I am open to suggestions. Anyone with ideas, please let me know. — dpw